Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007. During the Storage Networking World conference recently, Microsoft officially announced the release to manufacturing of System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. General availability is expected in November. The product will officially be launched at Microsoft IT Forum in Barcelona.

This release represents Microsoft's entry into the rapidly growing Continuous Data Protection (CDP) arena. Expect Microsoft to aggressively undermine the momentum of competitors -- notably Symantec BackupExec 11d. Microsoft is somewhat late to this game, so we expect the usual aggressive pricing and heavy marketing that is characteristic of Microsoft going after a market it wants to win.

Microsoft's positioning around DPM seems centered on the principle of using Microsoft backup to back up Microsoft solutions -- since "only Microsoft knows how best to back up its own technologies." Time will tell how successful this will be.

It's important to note that DPM represents a disaster recovery (DR) solution for Microsoft -- not to be confused with the high availability (HA) story that Microsoft has been rapidly building into the Exchange Server product. While both sets of technologies make use of log-shipping technologies, the difference between DR and HA is an important one. For example, standby continuous replication (SCR), clustered continuous replication (CCR), and local continuous replication (LCR) in Exchange Server 2007 all represent various HA options.... David Sengupta